Archiving old transations

[John Ralls]

On Jun 21, 2013, at 1:22 AM, Jonathan Kamens <jik at kamens.us> wrote:

> I pledge $100 toward a bounty to go to the developer who implements the functionality that I need within GnuCash, payable in US dollars, bitcoins, or beer, developer's choice.
> 
> The exact functionality is TBD. Here's a first stab at what I think is needed, which is obviously up for debate:
> 
> * The ability to mark all transactions prior to a certain date in an
>   account as reconciled without having to go through the
>   reconciliation process, e.g., I don't actually "reconcile" any of my
>   "Expenses" accounts, but the transactions will need to be marked
>   reconciled, because of the need for...
> * The ability to export all fully reconciled transactions in selected
>   accounts prior to a specific date into a separate gnucash file, with
>   the appropriate account records and other metadata for those
>   transactions also exported into that file so that it is a valid,
>   standalone file, after which the exported transactions are removed
>   from the current file and replaced with initial-balance transactions
>   in all the accounts from which transactions were exported.
> 

That's not *quite* what you want, because of open stock/bond/etc. positions -- the transactions are balanced
already because you've reconciled your brokerage statement, but you need to keep that buy transaction around
until you sell. That's not too hard to special-case so that only 0-balance stock/fund accounts are touched, though.
The other requirement that you missed is that a close-books needs to be run on Income and Expense accounts to
flush the balances into Equity, and all Cash accounts (Bank, wallet, etc.) need to have the deleted transactions 
summed into a new Opening Balance transaction.

This list isn't a very good place to put enhancement requests, though, because nobody goes looking through
the archive for them. Better to add an item to UserVoice (http://gnucash.uservoice.com/) or file an enhancement 
request (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GnuCash) -- or both. Do the enhancement request
first so that you can mention it in the UserVoice item.

Regards,
John Ralls